Tuesday, August 31, 2010

COLING Postscript

As foreseen (August 20 post), the venerable International Committee on Computational Linguistics (founded 1965) met in Beijing last week. It decided that the next COLING, the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, will be held in India, at Mumbai (Bombay) or Hyderabad, in the autumn of 2012. Enquiries to the Secretary of ICCL, Yorick Wilks, at ywilks@ihmc.us.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in machine translation, you can find a very full survey of current R&D at MT-surveyand the PowerPoint slides that go with it, at MT-slides (23 MB).

FOOTNOTEYorick Wilks was the man who opened my eyes to what machine translation meant. We were both attending an MT meeting in Ottawa in 1966(!) where I had to present an analysis I’d made of English phrasal verb structures. When I’d finished, somewhat self-satisfied, Yorick completely took the wind out of my sails by commenting loudly, “Well, Mr Harris, that was very interesting. But now, could you please tell us how you propose to put that on a computer?”

I immediately started looking for a computer programming course, one that I could understand.

About Me

Degrees in Arabic and Middle East History. Certified translator and certified conference interpreter. 30 years of teaching translating and interpreting in Canada, Spain and elsewhere, and of research. Now retired in Spain. For more, see 'natural translation hypothesis' in Wikipedia.